Needless to say, the university authorities see to it that no modern ideas get access to these young barbarians all at play. President Barrows’ first act as president was to forbid Raymond Robins to speak at the university; he knew that Robins had been in Russia, and learned some things which President Barrows also learned, but did not tell. The kind of speaker Barrows wants for his students he found in General Joffre, whom he welcomed with open arms, making a grandiloquent speech about “a soldier president welcoming a soldier hero.” The students thronged to hear the Marshal, though they could not understand him; and they mobbed young Herman Meyling for offering Socialist literature for sale. “Intolerance is a virtue in war-time,” says President Barrows; and, of course, all time is war-time to an imperialist.
The keen young commercialists of this school of hate are thoroughly imbued with the psychology of the dominant classes; even the boys who come from the working class are on the way to the top, and the quicker they learn to feel like gentlemen, the better fraternity they will “make.” “I think organized labor should be killed,” said one undergraduate to a friend of mine. So they are eager for strike-breaking expeditions, and their “soldier president” has kept alive this university tradition. When the electric workers went on strike, the mayor of Berkeley smashed the strike with university boys.
And then came the seamen’s strike, which proved a more serious matter; it is a lark to run a dynamo or a trolley car for a few days, but to ship on a steamer is something you can’t get out of, and some unfortunate boys who were trapped by the knavish university machine into shipping as seamen on the Matson Line and the Dollar Line paid for their blunder with their lives. Others of them came home thoroughly trained radicals—having learned more in a few months below deck on a steamship than they would have learned in a hundred years in the lap of their alma mater. Some of the steamships broke down at sea, and the capitalist newspapers were filled with scare stories about sabotage; but of course the real reason was inexperienced labor. On the steamship Ohio the chief engineer was a Washington athlete, the second engineer was a Boston dental student, and the third engineer an undergraduate student of the University of California!